The Bergdahl Chronicles: The Bitchening

Today, on the 70th anniversary of the landings at Normandy, as cable television news's never-truly-dormant America, Fk Yeah! reflex goes supernova, we should remember Ernie Pyle, unquestionably one of the three or four greatest American journalists of the 20th century, whose greatness lay in his willingness to go to the hot places -- and, eventually, to be killed in one of them -- and tell the actual stories of the ordinary men doing extraordinary things in them. One of his most famous dispatches concerned a group of infantrymen in North Africa in 1943. As with so much of his best work, Pyle was at his best when he was at his least romantic, and this is one of the most unromantic war storiesever written. I quote it at length:

It was in the November 23 [1942] issue, which eventually found its way over here. Somebody read it, spoke to a few friends, and pretty soon thousands of men were commenting on this letter in terms which the fire department won't permit me to set to paper. To get to the point, it was written by a soldier, and it said: "The greatest Christmas present that can be given to us this year is not smoking jackets, ties, pipes or games. If people will only take the money and buy war bonds . . . they will be helping themselves and helping us to be home next Christmas. Being home next Christmas is something which would be appreciated by all of us boys in service!" The letter was all right with the soldiers over here until they got down to the address of the writer and discovered he was still in camp in the States. For a soldier back home to open his trap about anything concerning the war is like waving a red flag at the troops over here. They say they can do whatever talking is necessary.

"Them poor dogfaces back home," said one of the ditch-diggers with fine soldier sarcasm, "they've really got it rugged. Nothing to eat but them old greasy pork chops and them three-inch steaks all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have to eat eggs several times a week."

"And they're so lonely," said another. "No entertainment except to rassle them old dames around the dance floor. The USO closes at ten o'clock and the nightclubs at three. It's mighty tough on them. No wonder they want to get home."

"And they probably don't get no sleep," said another, "sleeping on them old cots with springs and everything, and scalding themselves in hot baths all the time."

"And nothing to drink but that nasty old ten-cent beer and that awful Canadian Club whiskey," chimed in another philosopher with a shovel.

"And when they put a nickel in the box nothing comes out but Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw and such trash as that. My heart just bleeds for them poor guys."

"And did you see where he was?" asked another. "At the Albuquerque Air Base. And he wants to be home by next Christmas. Hell, if I could just see the Albuquerque Air Base again I'd think I was in heaven."

That's the way it goes. The boys feel a soldier isn't qualified to comment unless he's on the wrong side of the ocean. They're gay and full of their own wit when they get started that way, but just the same they mean it. It's a new form of the age-old soldier pastime of grousing. It helps take your mind off things.

I mention this, not just because of the day, but also because many of the indecent charlatans of our political class are making quite a meal out of e-mails that Bowe Bergdahl sent home to his parents in which he sounded disillusioned with America's mission in Afghanistan. Good god, is that where we're at now? A soldier's grousing is now a window into his "treason," which is presently being manufactured for domestic political consumption by a rabid exaltation of chickenhawks, and some military people who really ought to know better than to be used as cannon fodder by the ratfcking squad? I shudder to think what these mountebanks could have fashioned out of what the soldiers in the jungle who appeared in Michael Herr's Dispatches said about Vietnam.

And, while the country grapples with subject of walking away from a war, I think it's time to read Tim O'Brien's classic Going After Cacciato again, if only for this passage, which speaks to our current situation:

"In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a single thing more. Do you understand this? So I am saying to you that after a battle each soldier will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and that when a was is ended it is as if there have been a million wars, or as many wars as there were soldiers."

Making a political issue out of the doubts that he'd expressed about his mission in Afghanistan is part of a distasteful political effort to de-soldierize Bowe Bergdahl, to deprive him of a right that has been granted to ordinary soldiers since before Agamemnon sailed against Troy, to make out of him a character that does not fit into the phony America Fk Yeah! role that we have fashioned out of our "returning heroes," cheering them at ballgames and the like. But woe betide any of them who demand an audience for the one war they experienced if it runs contrary to that narrative, or if it can be coined into the cheap political currency of soulless ambition. This latter not only is no job for grown-ups. It is no fit job for human beings.

(By the way, apropos of the anniversary we celebrate today, how good was Ernie Pyle? He was this good,and he wrote that column on deadline.)

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